Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

Sound works okay via oss since 14 on this t480 (no pipewire, mangowm). I tri=
ed to add pipewire but not seeing any need to=E2=80=94everything works on th=
e audio side. Maybe its KDE/etc?

OSS is great for simple stuff, but it is a shame you have to poll for everyt=
hing and there is no way to listen for level/device changes.


Regards,
-K.

> On Jul 19, 2026, at 20:06, vermaden <[email protected]> wrote:
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> =EF=BB=BFHi.
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> For a start lets define some TERMS. I use UPPERCASE not to shout - but to u=
nderline a part of the sentence that is needed to be underlined - this is pl=
ain email - I do not have Bold/Underscore/Italic options - keep that in mind=
 - now - to the core of the issue ...
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> I always considered FreeBSD OSS audio/sound subsystem superior to all ALSA=
/PulseAudio/PipeWire and other dramas from the Linux world ... but not anymo=
re.
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> Somewhere between 14.3-RELEASE and 14.4-RELEASE things begin to get broken=
 - I thought that upgrade to latest and greatest 15.1-RELEASE would solve my=
 issues - as there were LOTS of sound/audio related things.
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> I will not even start about PITA syntax of mixer(1) which went into this:
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> % mixer -f ${DEV} vol.volume=3D+0.05
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> ... from MUCH MORE friendly syntax.
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> But these random 'boozing' sounds are just unacceptable ... and I can not e=
ven tell where they came from ... is it OSS problem? Is is PulseAudio proble=
m? Something in between? Because there is NOTHING in the logs for audio.
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> Its also possible to get that file from my personal 'mediafire.com' accoun=
t here:
> - https://mediafire.com/file/jw3cpk8g77rvks2/freebsd-tragic-audio-sound.mp=
4/file
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> ... and its not some fancy laptop from yesterday ... its a ThinkPad T480 f=
rom 2018 for fuck sake - hardware like that used to run smooth as Carlos Sai=
nz 'smooth operator' in Singapore GP ... but not anymore.
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> I do not even know what to add here ... its a message send our of despair .=
.. as newer releases only made these things worse ... I have been repeating t=
his over and over again - but its again probably the issue that 'too less' Fre=
eBSD developers use FreeBSD as their daily driver/desktop/laptop system.
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> Sorry to disappoint.
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> Regards,
> vermaden
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